In 2013, Jackson Palmer and Billy Marcus created a new coin based on a dog meme that had soared in popularity at the time. They named it Dogecoin and it was initially meant to be a sort of joke about the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies.
In 2021, years after its foundation, Dogecoin saw explosive growth, mainly because of tweets by Elon Musk and rapper Snoop Dogg that supported it. As of this writing, it’s the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Shiba Inu cryptocurrency ($SHIB) first emerged as a rival to Dogecoin. It’s even named after the Japanese dog breed that inspired Dogecoin. There’s an important difference between the two meme coins, though. While Dogecoin uses similar technology to Bitcoin, its spin-off Shiba Inu cryptocurrency runs on the Ethereum network that can execute smart contracts. That is a clear advantage over Dogecoin, because thanks to smart contracts, new exciting technological developments are possible. As you’ll learn in this guide, although it started its life as a Dogecoin killer, Shiba Inu cryptocurrency is more than a simple meme coin.
Ryoshi, an anonymous developer, initiated the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency project as an experiment in community building. It started with a supply of one quadrillion $SHIB tokens. Ryoshi locked 50% of the total supply in Uniswap and sent the other half to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet. Buterin used 10% of these tokens to support India’s Covid Crypto Relief Fund and he burnt the remaining 90%.
Vitalik Buterin isn’t the only veteran who thrust the project into the limelight. Thanks to tweets from Elon Musk in March and June, Shiba Inu once again caught public attention. At the time of this writing, with a market cap of around $17B, it’s the 13th largest cryptocurrency, just after Dogecoin.
Please enter CoinGecko Free Api Key to get this plugin works.Shiba Inu Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
As stated in the project whitepaper, which is called woofpaper, the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency ecosystem has three flagship tokens:
- Shiba Inu ($SHIB)
- Bone ($BONE)
- Leash Dogecoin Killer ($LEASH)
You can trade, buy, sell or hold these tokens on Shibaswap, the project’s own decentralized exchange (DEX), to earn rewards.
$SHIB is the original meme coin that started everything with one quadrillion supply. To better understand what you can do with it on Shibaswap, let’s start with the definition of a liquidity pool (LP). When you provide your tokens for other traders on a decentralized exchange, in this case on Shibaswap, the exchange must give you some tokens in return to show that you own that share of tokens in the LP. In Shiba Inu’s jargon, providing liquidity is called digging. If you dig $SHIB tokens on Shibaswap, you earn $BONE tokens in return, proportional to your share of the pool. It’s also possible to earn $BONE tokens by staking $SHIB. The staking is called burying.
You can trade $SHIB on third-party exchanges as well, such as Binance and Coinbase. The number of wallets holding $SHIB reached more than a million.
$LEASH was originally designed to be a rebase token pegged to Dogecoin. But the rebase function is turned off now. Contrary to the huge supply of $SHIB, it has a limited supply of 107,646 tokens. Owners of $LEASH can stake it on Shibaswap to gain $BONE in return.
So what then is the $BONE token that users are rewarded with?
From its start, Shiba Inu is all about its Shib Army community. $BONE will be a governance token for this community. Members of the Shib Army will be able to cast votes on proposals and decide which pair of tokens should be added to Shibaswap if they own $BONE. The more $BONE a member has, the more power they’ll have on the future of the project.
$BONE has a 250,000,000 token supply. You can bury it to receive your share of $BONE tokens from the Shibaswap pool.
Burning mechanisms
Burning removes tokens from circulation by sending them to a wallet that has no access key. It’s a hot topic for the Shib Army because eventually, the decrease in the circulating supply will result in a higher $SHIB price.
$SHIB’s current supply is around 549 Trillion. It’s huge, and the community urges the developers to burn the tokens in massive amounts. They recently started a petition on change.org.
The development team behind the project implemented a burning procedure to reduce the number of tokens last August. Two new pools were added to Shibaswap and $25,000 in both $SHIB and $LEASH were burned.
In addition, Shiba Inu collaborates with the cryptocurrency payment service provider NowPayments that burns a percentage of $SHIB per transaction.
But of course, compared to the total supply, these two actions are not enough to make the community happy.
Two prominent Twitter accounts that support Shiba Inu play essential roles in the burning process.
The first one is Steven Cooper, whose team burned 7M $SHIB in December. He also tweeted about the next burn party that will take place on the 26th of December.
Another important Shiba Inu supporter account is Ask the Doctor. The team promised to burn 1B $SHIB when the following two conditions are met. First, the petition on change.org that asks for $SHIB to be added by Robinhood must hit 1 Million signatures. Second, the related tweet must be retweeted 25,000 times. At the time of writing, it was retweeted 6299 times.
The total number of $SHIB tokens burned so far can be tracked on shibburn.com.
Shiba Inu Crypocurrency NFTs
The Shiba Inu project has an upcoming NFT game called The Shiboshi Game. In October 2021, they released an NFT collection that will be a part of the strategic gameplay of the Shiboshi game. The NFT collection is called Shiboshis, and it consists of 10,000 unique NFT creatures that come with various traits, such as laser eyes or a party hat. As in many of the other NFT-based games, such as Axie Infinity and Alien Worlds, these NFTs will have utilities in the game. They will be converted to game characters, and their traits will have corresponding gameplay elements. For example, the laser eyes trait can enable the player to attack long distances.
Shiboshi NFTs bring their owners some social club benefits, like a private club exclusive for the owners, direct communication with the team members, and getting informed about project updates earlier. Shiboshis were sold out in 35 minutes after the release. You can buy them from the secondary market on Opensea.
The team implemented a token burn mechanism within these NFTs. As Shiba Inu’s project leader Shytoshi Kusama explained in a medium article recently, at the time of purchasing, NFT creatures just have generic names. The owners of the NFTs can give the creatures whatever name they want, but for this to happen, they should pay an extra fee of $100 in $SHIB token. This fee is used to burn $Shib.
What does the future hold for the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency?
Here are the exciting new components that Phase 2 of the project will implement:
Shibarium
Shiba Inu’s own Level 2 blockchain is called Shibarium and is under development at the moment. Level 2 blockchains are the secondary frameworks built on top of the main blockchain to solve scalability issues and transaction speed of the underlying blockchain (Level 1), in this case, Ethereum. This will result in less gas and transaction fees for the users of the Shiba Inu applications that run on Shibarium.
$BONE will be Shibarium’s native token, so it’ll have yet another utility, once the blockchain is up and running.
$SHI
Shiba Inu will issue a stablecoin called $SHI. Its value will be pegged to $0.01. It will operate both on Ethereum and Shibarium. Stablecoins are used to hold a stable value. Because their values don’t change significantly, they’re suitable for everyday transactions. This is the vision with the new coin $SHI, using it as a payment method and a store of value. To assure $SHI’s price stability, Shiba Inu must have enough reserves of the underlying USD currency as collateral. However, no details were given regarding this aspect.
Incubator
Shiba Inu is building an NFT incubator by picking some of the best artists from various genres and styles.
Shibanet
It’s the upcoming decentralized marketplace where users can buy, sell, and trade assets using Shiba Inu’s ecosystem. It will run on Shibarium, and users will use $SHI as a payment method.
Doggy Dao
It’s the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Shiba Inu is building. The autonomy in DAOs is achieved through smart contracts that are self-executing codes that run based on a set of rules. Using smart contracts, Doggy Dao will provide the Shib Army voting power. Members will vote on proposals and decide on the project’s future. $BONE token will be the governance token used in the voting mechanism.
From gameplay to a metaverse
Backed by blockchain technology, many NFT gaming projects build player-owned economies that provide gamers earning opportunities besides playing for fun. For example, in Axie Infinity, one of the most popular blockchain games, players battle NFT creatures called Axies. If they win, they earn in-game token AXS. Such games are called play-to-earn games, and most of them are evolving into metaverses these days.
It seems that Shiba Inu is following this path as well. The team started to work with the well-known game developer William David Volk who will function as a consultant for the Shiboshi game project. Volk is the former VP of Technology at Activision.
They also partnered with an AAA game studio to create the game. AAA studios refer to mid-sized or major publishers in the video game industry. They didn’t reveal any details about the studio yet, due to a non-disclosure agreement.
The game will be mainly for mobile. The team plans to use the revenues earned from in-app purchases to burn $SHIB and $LEASH.
All these new components, Shibaswap DEX, the powerful Shib Army, an upcoming DAO, and the NFT incubator and game will eventually converge. And then, the project can expand into a Shiba Inu metaverse called Oshiverse.